Yours etc PATRICK HODGKINSON AND DAVID LEVITT
Please send letters for the website, clearly marked FORUM, to Julia Dawson at: julia.dawson@emap.com or The Architectural Review, Greater London House, Hampstead Road, London NW1 7EJ, England.
Brunswick revisited
SIR: We think it might be helpful to point out a few inconsistencies in Clare Melhuish’s
critique of the latest work to the Brunswick (AR March 2007). In her article she raises
the entirely valid point that after at least two years of continuous dust and hammering
many residents find that the 'transformation' has hardly touched their lives except to
remove a supermarket they could afford to shop in and has left their internal parts of
the building in much the same shabby state as they were before.
Would that it were possible to satisfy everyone immediately. What this first phase of
transformation has done is to arrest the long term decline of a major London landmark
and to secure its future without destroying its intrinsic architectural character.This
couldonly have been achieved by making the shopping economically viable and that
meant adapting the shopping street to suit current shopping needs ,including a large
supermarket and deeper and more visible shops than were there before.
Of the many things remaining uncompleted one of the most dramatic will eventually be
the cleaning of the two internal circulation galleries serving the flats , one on each side of
the building, and originally accessible for any member of the public to appreciate their
powerful appeal. Inevitable changes in the approach towards residents’ security since the
building was completed in 1972 have meant that all levels above the main street are now
inaccessible to the public and have also resulted in the removal of the original grand
staircase to the upper terrace. Michelangelo Antonioni may have got Jack Nicholson to
look unforgettable on this staircase but most residents, whose interests are championed
elsewhere in her article by Clare Melhuish, would consider sleeping safely in their beds at
night a more important priority!
The two covered circulation galleries are now the sole responsibility of Camden Council
which currently has yet more urgent priorities in repairing the forty year old steel window
frames and renewing unsafe electrical and heating mains to every flat.
Clare Melhuish goes on to criticise the architectural language employed to transform the
shopping street including of course 'stopping off' the street at its northern end to make way
for the supermarket and eliminating the original covered colonnades on each side of the
street. The original developer’s intention, enshrined in Camden council’s planning consent,
was that the Brunswick should extend from Bernard Street at the south end to Tavistock
Place at the north with a glass roofed shopping hall in between. That only two thirds of the
whole development and none of the shopping hall was built, with an unresolved and arbitrary
cut off at Handel Street, was due to the impossibility at the time of acquiring a Territorial
Army building on the north side of Handel Street. The termination at Handel Street has
therefore always been unsatisfactory and we believe that what has been constructed helps
to resolve the dilemma over how to turn what was to have been a temporary break into
something now inevitably permanent.
There is a similar lament in Clare Melhuish’s article for the loss of the covered colonnades in
front of the original shops, in spite of the discouraging effect they had on the main activity
they were created to promote and what the developers considered was the excessive width
of the central street in proportion to its length. The remodelled street is an undoubted success,
grudgingly acknowledged in the article, and this has to be due to a combination of the materials
used, Susanna Heron's water based sculpture and the width of the street itself.
As members of the original design team we believe that the architectural language employed in the
work just completed, as well as the retail strategy that lies behind it, is an appropriate reflection of
what was originally intended. By the end of this century the Brunswick will have almost certainly
experienced further such interventions and the strength of the architectural form enables this
to happen without undue dilution of the original.